The European Union is funding a number of HPC projects that are exploring different hardware and software technologies for exascale computing. One of these, known as DEEP-ER, expands on the notion of the Cluster-Booster architecture of its predecessor, the DEEP project. Using a mix of European HPC technologies from German, Italy and elsewhere, DEEP-ER is exploring some of the thornier issues of exascale, in particular, I/O scalability and system resiliency.
In an industry as forward-leaning as high performance computing, the focus on exascale and buying machines with the maximum amount of FLOPS hardware can be a distraction. The average HPC user is just looking to find the best performance possible for their applications with the hardware at hand. And in more cases than we would like to think, sometimes that hardware is just a personal computer.
The well-worn adage that a picture is worth a thousand words rings true when communicating the importance, content, and yes, the beauty that is uncovered as researchers explore how the brain works. Given that humans are wired to understand images faster and better than other forms of communication, brain research highlights the importance of scientific visualization
If ROSS was an actual human, he would certainly be the highest paid legal assistant in history. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of legal texts, and devours new ones quickly and effortlessly. Better yet, he can work seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and requires no office supplies, health insurance or retirement programs. Yes, ROSS is a computer program and his designation as a male is just one of convenience.
One of the most popular sessions at last weeks ISC High Performance conference was titled "Scaling Beyond the End of Moores Law," which was a series of three talks that delved into some of the technology options that could reanimate computing after CMOS hits the wall sometime in the next decade. The subjects popularity is unsurprising, given that the supercomputing digerati that attend this event are probably more obsessed with Moores two-year cadence of transistor shrinkage than any other group of people on the planet.
ARM has been something of stealth architecture in the battle to unseat the x86 as the dominant platform for high performance computing systems. That lower profile changed this week at the ISC 2016 conference, where Fujitsu announced it would develop an ARM processor for its Post-K exascale supercomputer. But the effort promises to have much a wider impact on the HPC landscape than just a single system.
Intels much-awaited Knights Landing Xeon Phi processor is now being shipped in volume to OEMs and other system providers, who will soon be churning out HPC gear equipped with the new chip. And if there was any doubt, Intel made it clear that with Knights Landing, it would be going after the same set of HPC and deep learning customers that NVIDIA has been successfully courting with its Tesla GPU portfolio. The official launch of the new processor was announced at the ISC High Performance conference (ISC), which is taking place this week in Frankfurt.
A new Chinese supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight, captured the number one spot on the latest TOP500 list of supercomputers released on Monday morning at the ISC High Performance conference (ISC) being held in Frankfurt, Germany. With a Linpack mark of 93 petaflops, the system outperforms the former TOP500 champ, Tianhe-2, by a factor of three. The machine is powered by a new ShenWei processor and custom interconnect, both of which were developed locally, ending any remaining speculation that China would have to rely on Western technology to compete effectively in the upper echelons of supercomputing.
NVIDIA used the opening of the ISC High Performance conference (ISC) on Monday to launch its first Pascal GPU targeted to high performance computing. The announcement follows on the heels of the introduction of the Pascal P100 at the GPU Technology Conference in April, a device which was aimed at the deep learning market. The new HPC GPU, however, differs from its deep learning sibling in some surprising ways.
Just as Intels newly minted Omni-Path interconnect is challenging InfiniBand for supremacy in the HPC datacenter, Mellanox is ramping up its 100G product line. The latest addition is ConnectX-5, the companys newest adapter, which will offer MPI offloading under the banner of co-design. The new network device will come in InfiniBand and Ethernet flavors and will also include additional capabilities and performance tweaks on top of 100G speeds.
